Manifesto! Revisited

Rather than revise my manifesto, I’ve decided to just take a look at what I wrote, and comment on whether I still agree with it, which parts I think I have lived up to and which turned out to be unrealistic or unnecessary, or which I simply didn’t get around to (my comments are in bold text):

Part 1: The Introduction

So, this is my manifesto for ENGL344, Intro to Digital Writing in the Genres. And specifically, this is the introduction to my manifesto. I have to admit, even after reading through some of the other manifestos my classmates have written, I’m still not completely sure how to approach this. I’ve never really been very good at really bold statements – I think Bridget’s Manifesto is great, but I don’t think I could write something quite like it, even though I know that’s the purpose of things here. To be honest, part of my struggle with all of this might have to do with the fact that I’ve never thought of writing as an art, even though I know it is. But there are things I associate with art and the mindset of art that I’ve always felt were fairly separate from writing. I’ve heard of people refer to writing as more of a craft, and somehow that makes sense to me. Granted, thinking about it now, I’m not completely sure how I would define the difference between a craft and art, but I think it does seem to factor into why I don’t think of writing as art.

Right off the bat,  I can certainly comment on this. I went into this saying that part of my trouble was not thinking of writing as an art. Looking at my projects so far, both the Remix and the Group project, I would say I probably spent much more time on the “art” side of things. Both of these major projects were essentially like art projects, built around text, rather than text projects highlighted with some visual art. I don’t think I’ve necessarily had a major change here, but I think I’m more comfortable with the idea of digital writing having the potential to be art than I had been.

So as far as aims for this course go, I would say a big one would in fact be to explore the notion of writing as an art, as opposed to writing as a craft. I think this should actually work, as I can say that some of the ideas we’ll be approaching here with digital writing do seem to have more in common with art than pure writing. One of my favorite websites is jodi.org, which has been around for a while, but I’ve always been inspired by its approach to digital art and experimenting with text, hypertext, images and web effects. It’s probably one of the first things I ever encountered that made me think about the possibilities of the web and hypertext as art, as opposed to just a means to display information. More recently, blueful.com has also made me really think about the possibilities of digital writing – blueful does some brilliant things by stretching out its story across a variety of Web 2.0 websites (so you go from a MySpace profile page with the text interspered into a profile, to a Youtube video that uses annotations for the text, to a Google Docs spreadsheet with more text spread out through the cells. It’s already getting some intersting reaction - this review covers some of the positives and negatives.  Even though I’d feel like I’d be ripping Aaron Reed off to some degree, I really do like this approach to using unusual mediums to place the text, and I’d love to experiment with it a bit.

As mentioned above, I certainly think I lived up to this. I never did anything quite as completely bizarre and out there as jodi.org, but the Group project with Shane definitely allowed me to explore some of the real boundaries that exist when doing digital writing. As noted, I also started off this class being heavily inspired by Aaron Reed’s blueful. One of my major projects, the remix of Prufrock, was essentially exactly what I hoped to do when I said that I was interested in doing something along the lines of blueful. I am pretty happy with the result, and also glad that I used the Remix project for this experiment. It allowed me to explore one of my big questions about what Aaron Reed did – would it work in the same way using an existing known text? My biggest concern with blueful was the fact that the novelty of the format the story was told in overwhelmed the story itself, so I wanted to see how it worked when using a piece of text that is already generally known. I think I found that this worked quite well, since it became less important that you already knew what the text was, and allowed the reader to completely focus on how the meaning of the text changed or was strengthened from what they already knew by having it in a new format.

Aside from that, interaction fiction has to be one of my greatest inspirations. Some of my earliest memories with the computer were playing old Infocom text adventure games, specifically Zork. Back then, of course, I didn’t really distinguish between the idea of “interactive fiction” and any other games. All I knew back then is that even though Zork was “text only”, I found it to provide a much richer experience than one could get on, say, an Atari 2600. Part of that of course is the Atari’s primitive graphics and simple gameplay, but I think there’s clearly more to it than that. Zork worked because it depended solely on text and its ability to trigger your imagination to fill in the details. Frankly, to this day, as advanced as computer games have become, I’m still hard pressed to think of a game that has engaged me like those old text adventures.

I’ve always wanted to explore interaction fiction, and now it is more accessible than ever – especially thanks to the relase of Inform 7, which makes it possible to write works of interactive fiction naturally, without having to actually write the underlying programming code. So I think that will be one of the biggest areas I focus on in exploring the possibilities of digital writing. I actually had forgotten about IF for a while, but recently a friend pointed me to an amazing work called Violet, which has really inspired me to try my hand at it finally. I highly recommend checking it out – you can actually play it online here without having to download a separate interactive fiction interpreter.

To date, I haven’t really touched on or explored interactive fiction in terms of creating it, at least in the sense that I wrote about it above. I initially had a thought of using the Group project for an interactive fiction work, but we ended up going in a very different direction. I think one of the realities of IF is that it is quite intensive. Especially if you want to do something more complex than just a branching story (i.e. where the interactivity is defined by giving the player choice in which path to go down, but without anything complex like puzzle solving or other complex events), it requires not only a lot of time to write, but also a lot of time to test.

I did however get a chance to explore IF in depth with the critiques, specifically my critique of Aaron Reed’s “Whom The Telling Changed”. I found this to be quite valuable actually; even though it was a critique rather than a creation, it allowed me to analyze exactly what goes into writing a work of IF. In particular, I didn’t only do a single critique based on a single playthrough. On my first playthrough, I was intrigued by the question of how things would have been different if I had played it a different way. “Whom The Telling Changed” is a good example of IF that is much more complex than offering simple branching decisions. It is built around the idea of seeing how your actions and decisions change the flow of the story, and the meaning of the story. When I played it and critiqued it again a 2nd and 3rd time, I got a much deeper understanding of what Reed was doing with this work. More importantly, it also showed me just how complex writing IF can be. With some IF, there’s really only one way to “experience it”. Especially the journey and puzzle based types of IF, once you’ve solved the puzzles or reached the end, that’s pretty much it. There’s nothing wrong with this (one of the other IF’s I looked at, although didn’t critique, was a game called “Violet”, where you are stuck in a room trying to write your thesis while in your mind your girlfriend is trying to encourage you. “Violet” generally does not have many different ways to play it, and once you solve the puzzles, you’ve mostly experienced what it has to offer), but it’s clear that people are really stretching the boundaries of IF now. Games like “Whom The Telling Changed” and “Galatea” are much more about the experience and storytelling than about solving puzzles.

But finally, what I learned from looking at other works of IF is that the more complex the idea, the more complex it is to write. Not only do you have to come up with the puzzles or interactions, but you also have to anticipate the different ways people will approach something. You might find it to be obvious that a player will know to pick up the bag in the room, but that is because you, as the writer, know it is there and put it there.

For my final project, I am working on an IF. I can’t say for sure yet how complex it will be, but I’ve at least gotten a much more complete idea of just how much work goes into creating even a simple IF, much less an advanced one.

Finally, I aim to be able to come out of this class with a coherent and direct response to the question of “What is digital writing?” – One of the things I’ve found so far is that when I tell people what classes I’m taking this semester, invariably people will ask “What is digital writing?”. It should be a simple question to answer, but I generally find myself responding with something along the lines of “Well, umm, you know….. like, writing for the Internet, writing for online. It’s like normal writing but with hypertext links to other pages or information, stuff you couldn’t do on the printed page. And, uhh, games, that kind of thing.” But this really isn’t satisfactory, and of course it only touches the surface of what digital writing is. Yet I find myself having trouble articulating what that is. One of my other big goals will be to clearly explain what digital writing is.

To be honest, I still feel the same way about this last bit now as I did at the beginning of class. Certainly I feel like I personally have a better idea of what digital writing is, but I still don’t feel like I can articulate it any better than I did before. I still face the same issue. One thing I think is that I’m more aware perhaps of the disdain people seem to have for it, in terms of seeing it as a serious medium. In my Fiction Writing Workshop class this semester, the subject of hypertext briefly came up, and the professor seemed pretty dismissive of it. He basically argued that it was something that was a hot subject for a little while, but never really took off, and isn’t really seen as a legitimate literary form. To some degree I perhaps do have a hard time completely arguing with this. It does seem like many of the examples of hypertext and IF we’ve seen are pretty “niche”, with specialized and small communities devoted to them. But then again, let’s be honest – a lot of standard literary fiction and poetry also caters to a pretty small audience.  Audience-size alone shouldn’t necessarily dictate the value of something (it occurred to me that a lot of the arguments made against hypertext and other forms of digital writing based on things like audience size and cultural impact could certainly be said about many modern short stories and poems). And of course, by that token, one could argue that the descendants of IF, like complex multi-million selling RPG games (a game like Mass Effect, for example, has hundreds of thousands of words worth of text, and the dialogue branching is certainly a form of interactive fiction), have much more cultural impact in terms of sheer audience size.

Part 2: Criteria For My Art

1. Whatever I create for this class has to stretch the bounds of what is possible with digital writing. It isn’t enough to just write something and stick in some links and other media and call it a day. Ideally what I put together for this class should be something that offers the reader a new experience, and allows them to look at something in a new way. jodi.org and blueful.com are good examples of what I am inspired by and would be striving for.
2. As a rule, I agree with the notion that nothing I do here should be something that could be duplicated easily in print. It wouldn’t be enough to write a linear fiction narrative and make it “interactive” by just having someone go from room to room or scene to scene. Or if it will be fairly linear (i.e. if I do something along the lines of blueful), it at least has to be an incredibly novel and interesting experience.
3. As another guiding principle, I will stretch myself by learning new techniques. Aside from learning how to write interactive fiction, I’ll make a rule for myself to try as much as possible to utilize technologies I’ve rarely worked with before, like Photoshop and Flash, and integrate them into my toolkit.
4. I also agree that multi-linearity is something I should strive for. I’ve always been intrigued by the initial ideas behind hypertext (especially the notion that links should be two-way, so that everything that links to something would have links back to what linked to it – of course, that isn’t always feasible, but it is an interesting goal).
5. Condemnations? That’s a tough one – I’m hard pressed to condemn anyone or anything, frankly, when it comes to art. I guess I can certainly condemn pretentiousness – I think that could be one of the hardest things to avoid. I’ve already seen how blueful has been criticized on those grounds, although to some degree most of that criticism is aimed at the writing itself, not the vehicle for telling the story (which most people seem to universally agree is pretty brilliant). But I think I would want to avoid something where the mechanism itself was the only thing of value – I do feel pretty strongly that the mechanism or storytelling vehicle can add a certain sense of “newness” to a work, but the underlying work itself should also be enjoyable.

Addressing these point by point: I can certainly say that I feel like I’ve stretched the bounds to some degree of what is possible with digital writing in both the Remix and Group projects. And by the same token, neither of those projects could come close to being duplicated in print (there isn’t even a notion that a static print version of them could really work). I probably only partially succeeded when I mentioned I wanted to learn new techniques. I certainly learned a fair bit of CSS and DHTML for the Group project, but I didn’t really do anything I didn’t already generally know how to do for the Remix project. For the Final project I am still learning something new about the Inform 7 environment for creating IF, so that part counts at least. To date, I also haven’t done much in the way of multilinearity (both the Remix and Group projects are very explicitly linear), but this also will hopefully change with the Final project. For the condemnations, I would generally reiterate them. I tried to avoid a notion of pretentiousness with both the Remix and Group projects, but I think to some degree there’s a degree of pretentiousness embedded in the very concepts behind both. I think sometimes that is just unavoidable, so I can recognize and condemn it while not being able to completely avoid it.

Part 3: Concluding Statement

Going back to my introduction, I’d have a hard time making a bold statement like claiming that the world would be a better place thanks to whatever I output in this class or based on whatever ideas I come up with. Certainly that would also be a great goal, but stating it outright is tough. I think at best, I would say that if at least one thing I create in this class is able to inspire someone else in the way that previous digital works like Zork, jodi.org and blueful inspired me, I would consider that to be a great realization of my goals. Considering that interactive fiction in particular is still very much a small niche (I read somewhere that interactive fiction is often compared to poetry, in that it is something that does not have a wide audience, but has a very devoted following among those who do care about it, and I think there’s something to be said for that), I think it would be great if anything I do here maybe makes someone else take a look at it as a genre and tries their hand at it as well.

So, in the end, I can only hope that I will learn some things about digital writing and interactive fiction that I didn’t know before, that I can finally create some digital writing that will be worthwhile and hopefully inspire others to do the same.

The jury might still be out on this; I think that, in the end, I did learn some things I didn’t know before, and most importantly, went from simply thinking some of these things would be cool to do, to actually doing them. That really might be the most important thing. Whether I inspired other people to also try some of these things, I can at least hope so.  Maybe not in this class, but if anything I did gives other people ideas for stuff to explore later on, I’d consider that a success. I’d say that’s pretty important to me as Aaron Reed’s work (both “Whom The Telling Changed” and “blueful”) were pretty major and obvious inspirations to me.

So, that’s it for my revisiting of my Manifesto. I don’t think I needed to really throw out or completely discount anything I started out with, and I’m generally glad to say that I got a chance to explore most of the areas I wanted to.